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Creativity is not a nice to have, it’s a must have. The reason it’s so critical for organizations to prioritize creativity, and not look at it as only something that design teams do, or maybe marketing teams do, is that we’re all trying to innovate. We’re all pursuing innovation. And from my perspective, creativity is the engine for innovation.
Innovation
An innovation is an invention converted into scalable value, and that value can be financial value, cultural value, social value. How do we go from that invention to that scalable value? Well, that conversion factor is creativity. Our organizations depend on it, especially in the midst of what we’re calling this 4th Industrial Revolution, which is characterized by ubiquitous technology. A lot of basic tasks will be replaced by automation, robotics, et cetera. So in the midst of this 4th Industrial Revolution, the organizations that make more room and space for the human to show up, and for what makes us uniquely human, are going to be the organizations that can attract and retain the best leaders.
Creativity
Creativity is our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value. Some people conflate creativity, only with art or artists. And so I began the process of figuring out a way to offer up a definition of creativity that could kind of democratize the ways we think about creativity.
Wonder is about deep curiosity, and audacity, and awe, and dreaming, and also pausing, because I like to remind people that it’s really hard to wonder when you’re going 80 miles an hour. The rigor component of creativity is what we often forsake. We’ll overhear people say things like, “Creativity is doing whatever you feel like.” Well, not exactly. There’s a lot of rigor involved in any creative process as well. And rigor is about focus, discipline, and time on task. We cannot confuse rigidity for rigor. Rigor is adaptive. Rigidity says we’ve got to keep going forward even though all alarm bells are going off and red flags are going up. So what it’s really important for people to understand, is that wonder is found in the midst of rigor, and rigor cannot be sustained without wonder.
Think about any tasks that you find to be quite rigorous. For me, it would be something like completing my taxes or finishing a really detailed Excel spreadsheet. How often do you find, in the midst of those very detailed time on task activities, that often this “aha” moment can emerge? And that’s what I mean when I say that wonder is found in the midst of rigor. At the same time, if we’re just running from meeting to meeting, we’d never have the opportunity to pause. It is actually in the pausing and what I started to call the invisible work, the work that we’re doing when we’re not on Zoom, when we’re not in front of the whiteboard, when we are going out for a walk, when we are daydreaming, when we are having those shower moments. That’s when the synthesis of ideas happens.
The 3i Creativity Model
I quickly realized it wasn’t enough to tell organizations and leaders at organizations, toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems, and off you go, you’re being creative. How do you operationalize that? How do you activate that on a consistent basis in your organization? And that’s why I developed the 3i Creativity Model.
The 3i’s stand for inquiry, improvisation, and intuition. Inquiry is all about a shift away from only what’s certain to also inviting in more questions. Improvisation is about going from the rule book to the playbook. And intuition is inviting us to not only focus in on what’s rational but to also incorporating our intuition for decision making. And if we amplify these 3i’s in our organizations as we lead, as we are interacting in teams, we will necessarily, also be activating both wonder and rigor.